Celebrate community-powered learning and the audacity to produce positive change, at this 2-day virtual festival that gathers together Udacity students and alumni from around the world! RSVP for Udacity Festival 2018 today!

All across the globe, everywhere you look, you’ll find Udacity students—lifelong learners who are committed to self-empowerment through education. They are young, old, and all ages in between. They are novices, and they are experts. They are entering the workforce, and re-entering the workforce. They are landing their first jobs, and they are established professionals. They speak different languages, live in different places, face different challenges, and have different opportunities. But what unites them all, is a passion for learning, and an unwavering faith in the power of education to produce positive change.

Your Invitation to Udacity Festival 2018

If you are a current student, or a member of our alumni community, then please consider this your invitation to Udacity Festival 2018!

A recent article from the University of California’s Chief Innovation Officer, about the impact of disruptive technologies on jobs and skills, poses critical questions about how we connect learning to jobs—today, and in the future.

Everyone from politicians to policy makers, utopianists to university professors, innovators to investors, is talking about the future of work, the fourth industrial revolution, and the automation age. It’s hard to avoid these topics, and if you’re between the ages of, say, 16 and 80, you probably shouldn’t avoid them.

The 2018 AI Challenger Global AI Contest is being co-organized by Sinovation Ventures—along with Sougo, Meituan-Dianping, and Meitu—and it features 10+ brand-new datasets, and a $450,000 USD prize.

In September of 2017, as an exclusive global education partner, Udacity had the pleasure of announcing details of a new AI competition and open data initiative organized by Sinovation Ventures. The event was entitled the AI Challenger Global AI Contest, and as Udacity COO Clarissa Chen noted in her contest announcement, “Artificial Intelligence has hit fever pitch in China. From cutting-edge tech powerhouses to established large corporations, everyone is setting up new AI Labs, hiring new talent, and announcing new platforms. “AI First” is the order of the day in China, and the excitement around this transformational technology is incredible.”

Success in 2017

The energy around AI across China was indeed incredible, and the subsequent success of the competition was clear evidence that it had been a perfect time to launch this kind of effort. Approximately 9000 teams from more than 60 different countries participated in the AI Challenger Global AI Contest, in 2017, and as reported by China Daily at the conclusion of the competition:

“AI Challenger released over 300,000 image-based as well as over 10 million language-based data entries to talents working on new technologies that will help AI applications ‘see’ and ‘read’ our world better.”

The 2018 AI Challenger Global AI Contest

China continues to represent a remarkable nexus for global AI innovation, and the 2018 AI Challenger Global AI Contest returns bigger, broader, and with more data than ever. As with last year, Udacity is especially pleased to be an exclusive global education partner, and we are excited to extend our ongoing collaboration with Sinovation Ventures to include new courses developed specifically to support contest entrants.

Your reaction to these posts probably depends on your own educational background, and your own career goals going forward. If you’re worried about not having a college degree, this all looks like good news—you’ve got a chance to succeed based on your skills, not your pedigree. On the other hand, if you do have a degree, this may look problematic—a devalued credential, and more competition.

There are two ways to establish and pursue meaningful goals for career advancement—focus on roles, or skills.

Career Advancement is a broad term that can encompass a wide array of outcomes. Defining success is often largely subjective, and results can be as small or as big as you want to make them. With this degree of variation, how does one pursue career advancement in any kind of meaningful way? What does real career advancement look like?

This is a question we’ve thought long and hard about at Udacity. It’s one of the first questions we asked ourselves back in the earliest days of our organization, and it’s a self-query we continue to engage in today. If our goal is to support you in your pursuit of meaningful career advancement, what must we provide in order to ensure that you realize your learning goals and achieve your career ambitions?

To fully and successfully address these questions, it’s important to identify and understand two main paths to career advancement: Roles, and Skills.

As a lifelong learner, your journey of discovery is ongoing. To ensure you’re able to make the best choices to achieve your unique life and career goals, our Nanodegree programs are organized into schools that offer clear roadmaps to success.

Is there such a thing as too much choice? When it comes to learning, we don’t think so. But, having a wide range of learning options at your disposal can make charting your own path to career success complicated. Each of us brings a unique set of skills and experience to the table, each of us has our own unique sense of work values, and each of us aims to represent a unique value to prospective employers. But even with a clear end goal in sight, it can be challenging to determine what exactly you need to do to reach your career goals.

With 30 different Nanodegree programs available, Udacity offers a wide range of learning opportunities. But how do you know what to take, and when to take it?

Fluency of ideas is a highly desirable future work skill, and the ability to come up with multiple ideas around a given topic is something that can be learned and practiced

There is a new line of thinking emerging around the topic of our AI-powered future, and what awaits us in the future of work.

If, in past years, the tone of most conversations has been on the dire side—the robots are coming to take your jobs and such—the winds are blowing in fairer directions as people start to realize the opportunities ahead. In short, we’re discovering there is an upside to automation—it’s returning creativity and related soft skills to a place of prominence.